Most Shared

Confessions of a World Cup Widow

Well, it’s begun. Coparenting was nice while it lasted. No more shared viewings of The Great British Bake Off back seasons or the last two episodes of Patrick Melrose, which I’ve been kindly saving on the DVR . Guess we’re not making it to Tully or even Won’t You Be My Neighbor?. Pause the pillow talk for 32 days (who’s counting?); there will be highlight reels to analyze and rapid-fire group texts with phone numbers I don’t recognize and pop-up blogs to read into the wee hours.

I’m not sure where I first encountered the term World Cup widow, but whenever those three words entered my consciousness, I sighed the internal sigh of a woman who has reluctantly identified her tribe. Let’s get the obvious out of the way: It’s a sexist formulation. Women, duh, like soccer, too. I’m no superfan, but I’ve written about soccer—albeit from an equal-pay perspective—and I’ve enjoyed a handful of professional games. But who set up an elaborate, selective cable package that excluded HBO and BBC America but subscribed us to half a dozen soccer-screening channels? That wasn’t me.

My husband’s vanishing act every four years would be deeply annoying if it wasn’t also kind of cute. The first World Cup he remembers (1994), he was just a corn-fed Illinois high schooler, teaching himself hacky sack (it was the ’90s, forgive him) in the driveway to hone his dribbling skills since the Niantic (pop. 600) school district was too small or too disinterested to have a soccer team. When he got hungry, he grabbed a Snickers, because that was what Tab Ramos told him to do. There was a Brazilian exchange student visiting that year, and so the TV room in his family home was crammed with classmates watching as the Brazilians took out the U.S. team 1–0, a score, he wistfully acknowledges, that made the match seem much closer than it was.

To equip myself with some empathy and more fully gauge his level of emotional attachment, I asked my husband to list his three favorite World Cup moments. I expected a vague answer via text a few days later. He called me approximately 11 minutes after I issued the request, on the phone, from London, in the middle of a business trip. One: The 2002 Japan/South Korea World Cup in which the U.S. qualified for the knockout stages by beating Portugal. He watched the middle-of-the-night match with his best friend at a bar on Murray Street, then showed up for his summer internship sleep deprived and elated. Two: Sneaking away from his government job in Washington to watch the final game of the 2010 Cup and witnessing Landon Donovan score the winning goal against Algeria in injury time. One of the most intense, communal experiences of his life, he swears to me, all the more so because it took place in a bar full of strangers. (A follow-up text pointed me to a New Yorkerarticle explaining the significance of the moment with reference to Heidegger’s Being and Time.) Three: Zinedine Zidane’s infamous head butt in the 2006 final. An “unthinkable act,” he solemnly states.

It’s something of a comfort to know that I’m not alone. I emailed the woman who married my husband’s coconspirator in the Murray Street bar, and she offered up some pointers. She tells me she makes her husband put the entire World Cup schedule into the shared calendar that dictates their lives: “It’s more constraining than his faculty meetings. He has tenure and can skip one of those. World Cup matches are unmissable.” The World Cup, she says, is on par with her sister’s wedding and “having to write a book proposal” as reasons why he’s declared his summer “very, very busy.” In the past, she tells me, she’s “booked flights with a toddler with unnecessarily long layovers to allow for watching Ghana play in an airport bar. Now I just don’t plan trips during the World Cup.”

Ah, the kids. Among my peers, this is the big shift from World Cups prior. I asked my husband how he thinks his viewing habits will evolve now that we’ve entered the post-children World Cup world. “Um, you tell me,” he (correctly) answers, but I’m not sure I have a plan. “I think the only way to ensure my husband does a reasonable share of parenting during the World Cup is to throw our efforts at limiting television out the window,” says my long-suffering ally in the WC widows club. “At least soccer is kind of slow moving on the screen, so I’m just going to pretend it’s less detrimental to developing brains.” My husband has a more optimistic (quixotic) view of the event: “I’m going to take a real run at teaching our oldest”—a 4-year-old—“about the joys and sorrows of sports in general.” Okay, fine.

I hate a traditionally gendered narrative as much as the next 21st-century feminist, so I asked the most die-hard female soccer fan in my Rolodex for her advice. “Oh, Chloe,” she said, “the answer is simple: Join him.”

? 2019 ? Condé Nast. All rights reserved.Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated 5/25/18) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated 5/25/18). ?Your California Privacy Rights ? The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached, or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. ?Ad Choices ? CN Fashion & BeautyVogue may earn compensation on sales through affiliate programs.